Interview with Rui Casais from Funcom - The Nordic Angle

Funcom is one of the oldest developers in the Nordic region. 2017 marks a return to the company's MMO specialty with Conan Exiles, and Anders got a chance to pick the mind of CEO Rui Casais.

By
Anders Høvring Hansen

Funcom is one of the oldest developers in the Nordic region, founded in 1993. The Norwegian based company started out making traditional singleplayer games in various genres, but a focus shift to massively multiplayer online games was spearheaded with the release of Anarchy Online in 2001 (which is still running and was recently launched on Steam /ed.).

Anacrhy Online concept art.

Since then, most notably, Funcom have released MMOs Age of Conan, The Secret World and The Park, while 2017 marks a return to Hyboria with Conan Exiles, yet an MMO.

In the following, Anders Høvring Hansen from IGN Nordic interviews Funcom CEO Rui Casais on the current state of things.

What’s been going on at Funcom these past few years?

Funcom has a colorful history of ups and downs and the last few years have been no exception. We’ve been transforming the company to match the evolution of the industry and the new strategy of smaller and larger games is a reflection of that. It’s good to see that the strategy is working with both the smaller games allowing us to learn and experiment with different ideas and with the first of our larger games, Conan Exiles, having a great start.

The Nordic game development scene has seen quite a growth spurt as of late, for example with the growth of Paradox and DICE, and also with smaller studios like Playdead and Image & Form. What kind of mission statement is Funcom working from amidst this?

We believe in making games we love and games we care about. It’s great to see the development of the Nordic game development community and to be part of it, with very creative and successful studios working on a wide variety of games. We’ve been around since 1993 and the company has gone through some significant changes during that time. We’re not the company we were back then and we’re not the company we were five years ago. We think it’s important to keep up with the changing times as long as we can keep focusing on what’s important to us: making great, immersive games.

Rui Casais, CEO - Funcom.

In 2015, Funcom experimented with a smaller scale experience in The Park. What did you learn from that, and are there any plans for more of those kinds of projects?

The Park was the first of our smaller and experimental titles and was focused on testing a new technology (Unreal Engine 4), switching to shorter development cycles (6 months vs the multi-year projects of the past) and launching on Xbox One and PS4. We succeeded on all the goals and many of those learnings were then leveraged into Conan Exiles. Last year we did another smaller experimental title called Hide & Shriek which served the same purpose. Our ambition is to create both smaller and larger games going forward, and not lock ourselves down to only one project for years at a time.

What is your perspective on "Nordic" game design, being a Nordic game designer yourself. What is it about our region that make our games unique?

What we’re seeing in here Norway is that a lot of indie developers are incorporating Norwegian culture, folklore, and even locations into their games. This is creating some truly compelling gaming experiences that cuts away from the tried and true high fantasy setting. One example is Red Thread Games' upcoming game Draugen which is based on Norwegian folklore and is set on the western coast of Norway in 1923. Another example is Through the Woods by Antagonist which is strongly inspired by Norse mythology and Norwegian art and nature. This is not necessarily a uniquely Nordic concept, though, but bringing such rich mythology, culture, and folklore to games is very exciting. I’m Portuguese and wouldn’t mind bringing some of Portugal into our games too!

Where do you see the Nordic game industry positioned in terms of global impact within the next 5-10 years and why?

The Nordic game industry is a very creative industry with world class studios, big and small, and I believe it will continue to be one of the industries pushing the boundaries of creative and commercial success in the overall gaming industry.

How do you view the development of VR? Speaking of The Park, VR seems almost tailor-made for that kind of experience.

VR is a very exciting technology that will eventually become mainstream. There are technical hurdles that still need to be solved, in addition to making the technology accessible to more than enthusiasts, but once those are reached it’s clear that it will be one of the largest mediums for interactive entertainment. We did consider The Park VR, but we felt it was still too early for us to go in that direction and decided to focus on what we know best – PC and Console.

Conan Exiles is launching into a very competitive market of early access survival games, a first for Funcom. How do you plan to tackle the challenges surrounding this unpredictable new space?

While the market of early access survival games is populated by quite a few games, we believe that it isn’t a traditionally competitive market per se. Many of the players that enjoy these games play them for some time and are willing to try another one after a while, so we hope that by providing a survival experience that is different and with more elements of traditional storytelling and RPG games we will have players enjoy both our game and the other popular games in the segment. In addition, we are fully committed to the early access program and will constantly listen to the players and improve the game, so we make it into the experience people want to have. We have been very clear in communicating the roadmap for the game and we’ve openly committed ourselves to bringing the game out of Early Access in Q1 2018. We don’t want Conan Exiles to linger forever in Early Access, and we’ve been very clear in saying is that we want to make a good example for other Early Access developers.

Screenshot from Conan Exiles.

Funcom has quite a revered history in the MMO space. That genre is in a very different place now than it was 10-20 years ago, and yet The Secret World, Age of Conan, and even Anarchy Online, have managed to weather through these changes. What are Funcom's plans for this space going forward, is it still a viable market?

There are still many players enjoying this space and we continue to invest in it as is proven by our relaunch of The Secret World coming this spring. We do see that some players have gotten a bit of fatigue from the very large time commitment that these games tend to require and are moving on to our online social gaming experiences, and we plan to create some of those experiences as well, just like we’re doing with Conan Exiles.

Funcom have made great strides in crafting video game narratives. Are traditional methods of storytelling still a priority for Funcom in the future? And what do you think of those in comparison to the potential in emergent narratives that can occur in a game like Conan Exiles?

Story and Narrative has always been a keystone of our games, and we have no intention to abandon that. Conan Exiles is introducing a strong element of indirect storytelling into the genre by having many story elements that can be found, read and seen, that give a lot of background into the Exiled Lands. While our game is a sandbox, it’s not an empty sandbox, it’s a fully fleshed out world to experience. In addition to this, with the flexibility and freedom we are giving players with regards to servers, admin tools and mod support, players are creating amazing narratives of their own, and nothing makes us happier than seeing that the players not only enjoy what we’ve made, but take it and create their own stories based on it.

How would you say you incorporate themes and ideas in your games that are uniquely Nordic?

That’s something we’ve done many times, and I think the best examples are found in our MMO The Secret World. Here we built an entire storyline around the Draug, perhaps one of the better known ‘monsters’ in Norwegian folklore. We also featured a narrative that incorporated Roald Amundsen, the famous Norwegian explorer and the first to reach the South Pole. It’s not about forcing our roots and culture into our games, it’s about finding exciting interesting elements and bringing those into the games regardless of their origin. The great thing about Norwegian culture and folklore is that it’s incredibly rich, but also relatively unknown out there in the big world so it feels fresh, unique, and different.

You have another Conan game on the way, of course still under wraps, but clearly you are planning to push that license further. Was it an obvious choice to focus on a harsh and brutal fantasy setting in the wake of the recent success of games like Witcher 3 and the Souls series?

It wasn’t so much about the success of Witcher 3 and Souls (although of course that does help), but more based on the fact that we are extremely knowledgeable about the setting and world of Conan, many in our team, myself included, worked for many years on Age of Conan and it’s a brutal world that is a perfect fit to the survival genre. It was a no brainer, really, to use an IP we know and love, that allows to create a game quicker and cheaper in a genre that shares many elements of the MMO genre we know so well.

Finally, what else can we expect from Funcom in the coming years? Apart from Conan Exiles, you have been uncharacteristically quiet.

Our upcoming relaunch of The Secret World is super exciting for us as it will allow many people to experience one of the best storytelling online games, in a way that is more streamlined and user friendly than ever before. We also have a few other games cooking up that we might talk more about later this year, so stay tuned!